Madrid 2012 - 13 January

I had a six-hour layover in Los Angeles, so I walked around the airport a couple of times. There’s a nice open area between terminals 1 and 2. (As always, you can click a picture to see a larger version.)

Inside one of the terminals was a very interesting display of art by Gregory Michael Hernandez. Here’s part of the description.

The Captive Universe Project is a method of photographing in all directions from a single point in space. The results are photo collages that are measured and cut by hand. When folded together into a three-dimensional object, the worldview is flipped inside out, showing a landscape that you can look around but not enter.

This project began in 2006 from a simple question: How can I photograph the entire landscape around me? I imagined the camera being in the center of a perfect cube: I can take a picture out through each side of the cube (6 sides), each corner (8 corners) and each edge of the cube (12 edges). When I started drawig what those 26 directions might look like in an object, I discovered the “Truncated Cuboctahedron,” also called “Great Rhombicuboctahedron,” a 26-sided object with 6 octagons, 8 hexagons, and 12 squares. The final step was to figure out how to align the camera lens with the mathematical coordinates of that object.

And here are pictures of the assembled and flattened polyhedra.

The terminals are undergoing renovation, and the construction barricades had some very clever sayings. Here are a couple. Hover over them to see the text.